The Uniqueness of Rock of Ages

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Defend your tower from rolling stones.

By Colin Moriarty

Downloadable services like Xbox Live and PlayStation Network are absolutely rife with tower defense games of all sorts. Yet, there's room for even more, especially if newer iterations in the genre come with something different. Enter Rock of Ages, a game whose unique and quirky nature immediately stuck out to me and set it apart. It stamped it on my radar as a game to keep an eye on going forward, and I think if you're a tower defense fan, you should keep it on your radar too.

Before seeing and playing it, Rock of Ages was described to me as "a tower defense game with a twist," which is quite accurate. Rock of Ages isn't merely a classic tower defense title, but a game that invokes other, admittedly eclectic properties as well. So you can expect a little taste of Super Monkey Ball when playing the offense-oriented parts of Rock of Ages, with an art style and humor most akin to Monty Python.

The premise of Rock of Ages is simple to understand, but it was clear to me even after playing the game for a mere twenty minutes or so that the game's depth is significant. The basic idea is to smash a circular rock through a door at the end of various courses. These courses require you to steer your rock, Super Monkey Ball-style, towards the door on the far end of it over and over again. This slowly whittles down the door's strength until you smash it, where you can conquer what sits on the other side of it in order to move on to the next stage.

Of course, that's only a small piece of what's really necessary, because your opponent will be able to set up various defenses that allow him to stymie or outright halt your advance towards his door. This is where the actual tower defense comes into play, as well as the resource management that's at the heart of games like this. Certain defenses will slow the ball down, force it to careen off of the side of the track, or perhaps worst of all, lose the speed necessary to smash the door with power. This creates an offense-and-defense dynamic, and while there's a single-player campaign, it will likely play strongest either locally or online with a friend.

An overhead view of a course.

The whimsical look of Rock of Ages is intentional, and goes a long way towards adding to its unique feel. In fact, when taken together with its unique play-style, Rock of Ages has great promise in terms of delivering an experience that we simply haven't had before. My time with it was admittedly short, but my interest has certainly been piqued, and I'm excited to see more.

Rock of Ages doesn't yet have a firm release date, but Atlus is shooting to get the game on Xbox Live, PlayStation Network and PC sometime in the second quarter of this year. And while there's no price-point as of yet, you can expect a campaign mode of somewhere between four to six hours, and extra modes to boot.